This message is from the teaching
ministry of James Tippins, pastor of Grace Truth Church. More information
can be found online at gracetruth.org and anchoringfaith.org. A people
for His glory, by His grace. There are few arguments that
people say he's talking, not the audience he's speaking to,
but the subjects that he's speaking of. Some people say that Paul
is talking about unregenerate people in Romans 7. But unfortunately,
I can't agree with that. Because Paul does a plenty good
work of expressing and exposing the state of the unregiterant
in chapters 1 through 3 of Romans. He talks specifically about them.
In chapters 4 on, he deals exclusively with the place of the believer
and their justification. He deals with the believer and
what the law does with the believer, etc. And so when we come to this
passage at chapter 7, a lot of people say, well, you know, that
doesn't make sense to me because, and then they give the answer
that I don't believe the law functions this way. What is that
called when we come to the text with a prior assessment and we
make the text work for what we believe? It's called eisegesis. It's called presupposition. It's
called bias or prejudice. Rather than read the context
of Paul's writing and go, hmm, never thought of it that way.
I'm glad that the word of God taught me rightly. You see, but
we all come to the scripture with these prejudices. We all
come to the scripture with a plethora of views about end times, a plethora
of views about the second coming, a plethora of views about rapture,
no rapture, half rapture, part rapture, a plethora of reviews
about, you know, what's the covenant of works, what's the covenant
of grace, when did it start, when is, who's this, what, and
wherever. Because we've been taught not wickedly, but somewhat
incompletely, little segments of Scripture throughout our whole
lives, especially us who have been in church since we were
little children. We've only learned pieces of things. We never really
put the pieces of Jonah together until we begin to read the Scripture
in its totality. We never really saw that Jonah
was a shadow of Christ. In the working of God to bring
him out of the whale, out of the fish after the third day,
Jesus uses Jonah to allude and to foreshadow his own death,
burial, and resurrection. So in the same way, we have to
be careful not to come with presuppositions or prior learnings or prejudices
to the text And that is why we teach it in context. That is
one of the reasons that I have, over the last 15 years, done
a very focused effort on exposition. That means when I teach out of
Romans, I don't want to teach just a couple of passages out
of Romans and then go on to a different series. I want to stick with
the totality of Romans, just like we've been doing with John's
Gospel on Sunday mornings, which, by the way, we just finished.
This week will be Sermon 66 in John. chapter, where are we now,
John 8, it'll be 8 verse 13 this coming Sunday. So, the reason
we do that is because if I am left to choose and pick what
I think needs to be taught out of Scripture, then I will always
give you my precious pet theologies. If I come up to something that
I really just don't want to spend the time trying to deal with,
like Romans 7, then I'll just move on to something like Romans,
what, 13 and tell everybody how they ought to obey the law of
man. And it'll be right partly, it'll be good, but it will be
out of context. And so we come to the scripture
in context. Exposition is the safety net
for the church so that you cannot be what? inundated with my creativity
or even my error because if I teach something here in Romans 1 through
6 accurately, then all of a sudden in Romans 7 I seem to contradict
what I've already read to you and what you've already read
and studied, then you'll be, an alarm will go off and you'll
say, wow, something's wrong here. And that, especially when we
get to Romans 9, People love to put Romans 9. Some people
actually say Romans 9 is talking about ethnic Israel and nothing
else. That's not talking about ethnic
Israel. Paul is answering the objection. Why is it that so
many of the Jews, specifically the leaders of the Jews, the
spiritual leaders, the Sanhedrin, the chief priests, the scribes,
the Pharisees, the Sadducees, rejected their own Messiah? Why
is this? People would say, well, God is
not faithful to His promise. And Paul argues that's not true.
God is faithful to His promise. and then he explains how that's
true. The same thing is true in chapter 7. We've seen that
we are dead to sin. We're alive to God because of
Adam. We are guilty before God, whether we've done anything good
or bad in the world. Now see, that contradicts the
customary Americanized focus of humanity, doesn't it? Humanity
in our world today comes with either two extremes. Either there's
the bah humbug, everybody's a devil, or there's the, oh my goodness,
everybody's perfect, until what? Until they become evil. But the
scripture says that no matter how people act or live or love,
they're still guilty before God. That whether they've done anything
good or bad, they're sinners and the guilt of Adam remains
on us. It's interesting that Eve is the one who violated the
law and then Adam followed, but nowhere in Scripture, nowhere
in Scripture does Paul or any of the apostles, nor Jesus when
he teaches, say or blame Eve for the fall of humanity. Adam
is the federal head of the sinful fall of humanity. And that's
what Paul is referring to in a small sense here in Romans
chapter 7. Some people would say that he's
talking about unregenerate people, but as I've given you the idea
that he's already dealt with unregenerates and it doesn't
pick and he's already talking about regenerate people, Secondly,
I believe that he's talking about the present time and himself
as a regenerate person, not as himself as an unregenerate person
for several reasons. One is because it's in the first
person. It's in the present tense. Paul
speaks in the present tense in this chapter in such a way that
the language asserts that he's talking about himself now as
he writes. Secondly, we also see, what did
Paul think of himself before he was converted? What did he
think of himself? He thought very highly of himself.
As a matter of fact, his spiritual resume to the church of Philippi,
he says that, according to the law, I was blameless. He even
gives the bragging, on the eighth day I was circumcised, given
the name of Saul, of the tribe of Benjamin. I mean, how much
more Jewish can you become? Now I am the Pharisee of all Pharisees.
I am part of the Sanhedrin. He was bar mitzvahed at the age
of 13. You know what that means? The
son of the law. Bar mitzvah. When you become
a bar mitzvah, that means son of the law. That means you are
obligated to obey the law of Moses. And so Paul was a dedicated
and determined Jew. And his resume before conversion
was one of perfection. So he would not have ever confessed
that he had covetousness in his heart because he had no covetousness
in his life, according to his understanding. But when he says
there, let's look at this scripture in verse 7. What shall we say? That the law
is sin? By no means. Yet if I had not
been for the law, I would not have known sin. He's talking
about himself in the first person. For I would not have known what
it is to covet if the law had said, thou shalt not covet. But
sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in
me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies
dead. I once was once alive apart from
the law. This is when he was a Pharisee.
But when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. That's
when he became a believer in Christ. The very commandment
that promised life to me proved what? To be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity
through the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment,
sin killed me." Sin killed me. So the law is holy. The law and
the commandment is holy. And the law and the commandment
is righteous. And the law and the commandment is good. And
then Paul asks a question, and this is where we'll close out
tonight. Did that which is good bring death to me? By no means. It was sin producing death in
me through what is good in order that sin might be shown to be
sin and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure. And that's where we're going
to be tonight. So let's think about this for a second. Let's
put this in perspective from a Jewish point of view in the
writings of Moses. If we go to Genesis chapter 3,
you don't have to turn there, but let's just talk through that
for a moment. We all know the story of creation. We all know
the secondary application or the secondary exposure of the
creation of man and woman and the institution of marriage.
And we all know that Paul, in his apostolic authority, that
in other words God, through Paul, affirmed what marriage really
is. and what it was really intended
to depict, to picture, by what? By showing us in Ephesians chapter
6 and Colossians chapter 3 that it is to display Christ and His
death and headship as a Redeemer for the church, the bride. So
in the same way as Christ loved the church, He gave Himself up
for the church. Husbands, you love your wives
as Christ loved the church. And in the same way we, as the
church, submit to Christ, wives also in the same way submit to
your husbands. Respectfully. Because this is
what marriage was for. To display a microscopic picture. What is microscopic? Something
that's so small we can't really see it with the neck and eye.
So we have to think of it very, very small. That's what marriage
is in this comparison. Marriage is a microscopic picture
of a macro. What's macro? It's large, cosmic. That's not my word, I stole it,
but it's a macrocosmic reality of Christ in the church. This
large, grand picture, this microscopic, little, minuscule, un-invisible
thing called marriage is to show the macrocosmic reality of Christ
in the church. This huge, glorious revelation
of what it's supposed to be, what church, what the body of
Christ is as her head, the andros, which the Greek is andros, the
English word for that is husband, head. Paul in some way. I don't know
that he's necessarily doing it here in the writing to this Roman
church, both ethnic Jew and Gentile alike being here, but I want
to point here for just a moment. We know what happened after the
first marriage where God gave the woman to the man as a symbol
of God giving the sheep to the son. No one can come to Me except
the Father draw him, and all who the Father draws come, and
all who come I will never cast away. No one can come to Me unless
they're given to Me by the Father." This is the unity of us in Christ. This is what it looks like for
us to be redeemed, that we have been given as a bride to the
Bridegroom, who is Jesus Christ our Savior. And what happened when God put
Adam and Eve in the garden? He gave them promises of eternal
blessings. But isn't that funny? When I
say that sometimes in larger crowds of mixed depth of maturity
and spiritual things, I can see it sometimes when I say, God,
He just exposed Adam and Eve to the deep riches of blessings. Everything that could possibly
ever want, He gave them. And people go, I thought he told
him not to eat. He did tell him not to eat after
he told him to eat. He said, you can have everything. The whole world is yours. If
you can get there, you can touch it, you own it, you rule it,
you bring dominion over it, see. Just, you see everything you
have? I mean, imagine being floated
up above, let's just say that God took us all to the moon right
now and said, see this universe? It's yours. And we're going,
wow. What about what's in the universe?
Anything. You mean all the gold? Yes, yours. All the castles,
all the kingdoms? Every rich person, every poor
person, we're in control, absolutely. You're like a mini-God. We'll just pretend like we're
Mormons for a minute. That's what they believe, that they're
gonna become gods. Jesus was a man and he became a god. And
we think about that and all of a sudden, yes, everything in
the cosmos is yours to control and to do whatever you like,
but there's a rock over there behind that plant that's about
this big, don't touch it. Because if you do, you're gonna
die. That's what God did. God showed
Adam and Eve everything and gave them everything and said, don't
touch that fruit. You see that tree in the middle
of the garden? Don't touch that. You know what I think the difference
between those trees and the ones to the left and the right? Nothing.
There's nothing supernatural about those trees. There's nothing
mystical about those trees. They were just sanctified. What's
that mean? Holy, hagios. That means they were set apart
for the purpose of God. So the fruit on this tree and the fruit
on this tree, equally appealing, but what happens to the human
flesh when somebody says, you can't have this? I used to sell
a lot. My dad used to always say I could
sell ice to an Eskimo or dirt to a, what do they call those
guys out there? I can't remember, camel dealer.
I'm just like, what are those big animals? And it's not necessarily true,
because I don't know any Eskimos and I've never met a camel dealer. One of the clear ways in which
we would turn a sale that was going awry into something that
was a little bit more sticky is if, all of a sudden, you pause
in the middle of a sales presentation, and the person's like, well,
I don't know, I need to talk to my wife, I need to talk to my husband, I need
to, I've got to think about it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
you know, and there's all these tools, and Mike, you know, I mean, we've
been through training, I've been through the Dale Carnegie course, and this
course, and that course, and it's all just psychobabble stuff,
but it works for some people. But one thing that works for
almost all people is when you say, it's okay, it's no problem.
You know, we have many other things for you to choose from,
but what do you mean? I mean, there are other people
looking at this. You can't have this if you leave.
Oh, well. You take away what somebody has
never even thought about having, and all of a sudden it's important.
It's like the piece of junk that sat on great-grandma's shelf
all those years that she would spank you good with a fly flap
if you got near. A little figurine. You know,
she passes away and it goes to momma's house, or grandma's house,
and she passes away, goes to momma's house in a box on the
shelf, and you find it and it's time for a yard sale. And you
throw it out there on the yard sale and you put a dollar on
it. Because it's ugly. I mean, you know, you know what
I'm talking about. It's ugly. But great-grandma
loved that thing. And the sentimental value has
gone because the great-great-grandkids didn't really ever remember anything
but the slap of the fly flap anyway, so they don't want to
hold on to that thing. It's a little traumatic, like
PTSD. And all of a sudden, somebody
comes along and sees that, and they start acting a little funny.
And you're there like, gosh, would they buy that already?
And then they go over there and take pictures of it, and they go drive
away, and they come back, and there's two people there. And all of
a sudden you think, what's going on here? Would they buy that
piece of junk or not? And so you just decide to look
it up. And you look it up on the internet, and there are $1,000
a piece on eBay. And now they're toting it around
and you're going, man, I wish they'd put that thing down. I'm going to take it off
the yard sale table. I'm sorry, ma'am, that's not
for sale anymore. This piece of junk that you could care less
about now that you think it's got value is the most priceless
thing you've ever seen. That's my great-grandmother's
and I didn't mean to put it out here. You see, it happens all the time.
That's why when I see a good find in a five and dime or whatever
they're called now, thrift stores, I don't go, you know, I don't
get excited. Hold it in my hand. I might pick
up two or three other pieces just to not draw attention to
the fact that I've got this one piece and I'm walking around
for 30 minutes like it's an 80. This is a $300 plate. I'm gonna sell
it. Make a little bit of profit. You can do that sometimes. But
why is it that it doesn't matter until we find out it has some
value? See, that's what the devil did in the Garden of Eden. Instead
of focusing on the positive promises of what God had told them, that
they had everything, And that if they just did what He told
them to do in the positive, and also did not do what God had
told them to do in the negative, which is don't touch the fruit,
don't eat the fruit, what is it? All of a sudden the enemy
comes and says, don't you want to eat that? No, no, no, no,
no, no, we can't touch that lest we die. Did God really say you
would die? You know what it is? See, Satan
told the truth deceptively, which is a lie. Satan said something
true about God. God is withholding something
from you because if you touch that fruit or eat of it, you
will be like God. Now see, that's true. You'll
be like God in the fact that God knows the knowledge of evil.
But he didn't let that, they're thinking, be like God. Oh well,
God breathed me into existence and took me out of this man's
rib. Holy cow, what could I do if I could do that? I'm not saying
that's the extreme that Eve went to and Adam went to, but that's
the kind of deceitfulness that the devil does. He just leaves
it to the human imagination to say that what you cannot have
actually is withholding some great blessing. A lot of time
young people think that being a Christian and being submissive
to the church and submissive to their parents is a killjoy.
I just can't wait till I can get out of this authority. You're
never out of the authority of God whether you're 18 or 81. And quite honestly, the promises
of God and what He has given us and all the blessings that
come with being in Christ are far more abundantly joyful and
satisfying and glorious than any of the things He tells us
not to do because when God says not to do it, He does it for
our good so that we do not die. I mean, sure, I remember that
when I was, you know, 10, 11 years old, that Christmas was
a big deal growing up in my household. I mean, we put trees up in every
room, we had lights on every orifice of everything in the
house, and it was done well. And I mean, you know those great-grandma
things that you never could touch, they went out, and then you got
spanked for walking in the room too fast? Don't you walk so fast,
that breeze will tear it out, that's a really nice outfit.
But there was always one little cheap thing we could always touch,
and it was this ceramic, not ceramic, this plastic Santa,
about three feet tall. You know what I'm talking about?
And underneath that Santa was just one bulb that was like 7,000
degrees. Sort of like the night lights
that I talked about Sunday. 7,000 degrees. And it was the
cheapest cord you ever saw and it was the two-prong because
there was no grounds in those days. And I remember one time
it was plugged into the sewing room at my grandmother's house
and I went by and my brother kicked it. And when he kicked
it, all the lights were out, so the center was just glowing.
It's sort of weird. He kicked it, and it came unplugged, and
out of the wall came a spark. I'm like, that was cool. So what
do we do? We plug it back in and kick it
again. And the spark there. And then I thought, well, the
kicking is too slow of a friction. Why don't I just yank it out
with my hands? So I put it in there, and I yank it out. And
I yank it out. And I'm like, we could get this
going. So we, faster, faster, and all of a sudden it goes,
flames shoot up the wall, like to the ceiling. We turn on the
lights and the wall is black. The Santa thing has melted to
the terrazzo floor. And we know we're about to get
the worst whipping of our adolescent lives. Why did we do that? Some stupid experience. We were told not to touch those
things. We were told not to yank stuff out of a light socket.
But oh boy, was it fun for 30 seconds! And then it wasn't fun. Not only did we have our legs
tickled, that was my grandmother's code for spanking you till you
could not breathe with a switch. You know, I'm going to tickle
your legs. I usually laugh and wet myself when I get tickled.
This ain't funny. You know, you tickle your legs
and you walk to the switch and you come back with a twig. She
goes back and gets a limb and beats you with it till you can't.
But she would wiggle that thing and it would tickle. It would
burn. It's like fire ants on you. Like, throw me in the nap
bed, please don't hit me. I mean, you know. And so we just tickled.
We got our legs tickled, and then we had to go and clean that
wall. And you know, the stain of that
burn was on that concrete wall until I graduated high school.
And then my stepdad painted it. I don't know why they never painted
it. It was not in a common area of the house. Nobody ever went
back there unless you were just family. But it was just one of those
things, you know. We thought that was so fun. We
could not realize it. Man, now we know why they don't
want us to have fun. No, they don't want us to burn
down the house. Had that been, you know, a more contemporary
part of the house that wasn't block and metal and steel, it
would have caught the paneling on fire and burned the house
down. How dumb are we? God's law is the same thing.
It gives a promise, doesn't it? It gives a promise that if we
obey, we live forever. But if we disobey, we die immediately. The problem is that you and I
have never had that relationship with the law. It's never been
given to us. We've never had the relationship with the law
that Adam had. Because Adam and Eve were the only two human beings
that ever existed that had that relationship with the law. That
if you obey, you live. If you do not, you die. We've always been under the death
warrant. We've always been under the guilt.
But it doesn't make the law bad because Paul says the law cannot
save. He's already said that, that
no man is justified by the works of the law. No one can come to
God and stand before Him and say, I did the best I could and
the best we could and the best of days and the best of morality
is the worst of guilt. But Paul's already said, so what
should we do, just sin? No, we don't want to do that either.
We're not stupid. We're not fools. We know that
sin, even if we're saved, comes with consequence. We don't want
that consequence. We want to honor our Lord and Savior. We
want to follow after Christ because we love Him. Why? Because He
first loved us. It's compulsion out of adoration,
not compulsion out of fear. Some people don't like me to
use the word compulsion. So then Paul says that the law came,
and when the law came, when did the law come for Paul? At his
bar mitzvah? No. The law came for Paul on
the road to Damascus. The law came alive. The law came alive when Paul
was converted. Because what it did is it showed him in that
zeal that he had for truth, and that zeal he had for the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and that zeal he had for the
Word of God, and that zeal he had for the worship of Judaism,
it was all, according to Jesus, following after the Father who
was the devil. He was pious. according to his
own interpretation and understanding of the law of God, which is a
display of God's righteousness, which is what we talked about
the whole time last Wednesday night, remember? The righteousness
of God. And here, all of a sudden, Paul,
in that moment, in that instant of this church, in that instant,
on the way to do a holy thing, to arrest the apostles, the law came alive and Paul died.
Why did he die? Because the wages of sin is death.
When the law was revealed to him as it was intended to be
seen, He saw He was not sinless. He saw He was not perfect. He
saw He was nowhere near obedient. He saw everything in His life
that could possibly be evil, and imagined Himself the most
vile sinner that has ever lived, because in reality, He was. Why do you persecute Me, Saul,
Jesus says? Why do you do this? And God,
in His sovereign mercy, sovereign grace, saved Paul that Paul might,
what? Express and proclaim and teach
the gospel to the Gentiles. The chief of sinners, Paul says
to Timothy, I am the chief of sinners, but God, in His great
mercy, saved me. And when He saved Paul, Paul
saw the law for what it was, and he said that the law was
good. But then what happened when the law came alive and he
died? Sin came alive. Sin came along. Just like in Eve, all of a sudden
it's just sort of this... And I can argue philosophically
that Eve already had seen, because the Bible says, seeing that it
was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and to make one wise. She was tempted in that way.
So maybe she'd been thinking about it for a couple of minutes.
But either way, all of a sudden when you're told no, it's the
one thing that our flesh continues to focus on. You cannot have
this. You cannot do this. Then all
of a sudden we want to do that. No matter all of the great blessings
of everything that we can do and should do, no matter the
perfect working of God in these affirmative things, in these
positive things that we are instructed to do, we see them as an obstacle
to our joy. The law is not a burden for the
believer because we know what it's supposed to do. It is supposed
to show us our sin. Yes, it is the standard of God's
righteousness, but it is not the standard of God's righteousness
for us and our flesh, because no act of obedience will put
us in the right standing with God. It is only the righteousness
of Christ that is imputed to us. It is granted to us in the
sense that our account is credited for Jesus' obedience. This is
the gospel. And Paul says the law is good.
In verse 13, here we are, now that it's 20 minutes till the
bell, Did that which is good then bring death to me?" Some
people say, well, the law kills us. Well, Paul does say the letter
kills. Why does the letter kill? Because the wage of sin is death.
You see? The law was not bad and the law
was not evil. The law was good and pleasant
and awesome. The word all full, remember,
it actually means full of all. So we've seen how awful is the
place that we are with Christ when we enter into the doors.
We're not saying it's terrible, it's good, it's full, it's great.
but that which is good did not bring death to me. Sin brought
death to me, but the law made sin alive in me. I now saw that
I wanted things." And that's what Paul is talking about, covetousness.
He coveted things that he never realized he coveted. It didn't matter what they were.
Does it matter what we covet? If we covet the kid in front
of us because he has a lollipop, The wages of that sin is death. Just think about that, kids.
You see a friend of yours get a sucker at the bank and you
didn't get one. He went, man, I wish I could have that sucker.
I want that sucker. I want a sucker like that. You know that sin? When we feel frustration that
we don't have a sucker to? And there's nothing we can do
to stop it, is there? There's no, we can pretend and go, oh,
that's okay, I don't want a sucker. No, it's all right, I don't want
a sucker. You go, I hate that guy, he got a sucker. Somebody else gets, actually
that happened today in our car is why it's fresh on my mind.
Why didn't I get a sucker? It's covetousness. And even if
it never comes to fruition, even if it never comes out of the
mouth or the body never engages or the face or the eyes never
roll, we never can escape the guilt of that covetousness that
we want something that we are not supposed to want. That we
desire something that we're not supposed to have. The law is
good in that, because, beloved, listen, if it weren't for the
grace of God in regenerating us to show us this working of
the law in us, to show us the sin in us, we would be none the
wiser. Now some of us would say, and
I would agree, and I would stand in that corner, oh, I cannot
wait, for I do not fester with the fight against sin. I cannot
wait, I cannot wait, y'all, when my flesh is forever eradicated
from temptation. I cannot wait. from anger, from
fear, from doubt, from sadness, from frustration. The emotions
alone, the thoughts alone are more than I want to give time
for. But oh beloved, what a wonderful
time it is for us to see when the law brings these things to
our mind, when we see that we do not love the Lord with all
of our heart, mind, soul, and strength. When we see that we
do indeed worship other idols, even if it is our children or
our car or our new dog, that we don't even notice but we love
it so much and we find a joy that we haven't found in months
or years, that we haven't found in Christ in a season. When the Scriptures show us that
we should not lie, but yet everything in our being, we do not want
to speak the truth in love to someone, so we smile and say,
no, all is fine. When we have a need that needs
to be met. Sometimes when we come to disobeying our parents
and not honoring our father and mother, even long after we have
moved on in our own lives as adults, as parents ourselves,
it's not that we have to submit to their every whim, but we must
honor them even in our not submission. And the list goes on, not to
murder. We know that gossip and hatred is murder according to
the Scripture. So we see that we are indeed
the sinners that the Scripture calls us as sinners. Therefore,
what is the outcome of that for the church? What does the law
do for us? Can I steal away from Paul's
teaching to the Ephesians and say it is to the praise of the
glorious grace of God? Yes. Because it is there that
our heart shines greatest when we see the depth of our depravity. And then all of a sudden the
Holy Spirit shows and reveals to us that there is no way possible
we could ever stand before God and give an excuse for all the
mouths of all those who are under the law are closed. No one can
give an account. But Christ can give an account.
Christ can say, I obeyed, Father. Christ can say, I suffered their
shame and guilt on the cross. And Christ can say, and I was
resurrected. These are my body. So the same amount of judgment
that God will pour out in the future on His Son is the same
amount of judgment that God will pour out in the future on His
church, which is zero. So that sin produced death in
me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be
sin. And through the commandment might
become sinful beyond measure. Now what's he mean there? Friends, a lot of people like
to argue with me that we must start with the law and the evangel. the gospel? It's not there. Is it wrong to teach the law?
No. But we must teach it as Paul teaches it. We start with this
reality that God became a man and lived obedient
and died a death to pay for the sins of His people. That in itself
begs to expand, doesn't it? The sins of His people. Then
the law can come to light. What sins? Thou shalt not covet. What does Jesus say to the young
rich ruler? What must I do to inherit eternal
life? And Jesus, He doesn't give him
the specific, but you know, you know, honor your father and mother,
love the Lord your God, not lie, just a couple of, He knew the
Decalogue, the Ten Commandments. Oh yes, I've kept those since
my youth. Let's reach in a little. Since I was a bar mitzvahed,
I have been obedient to the law. And Jesus tests him in that and
shows him. But he does not regenerate him, does he? He says, then go
do this thing. Go do this one thing. Actually,
he says two. Go take all that you have and give it to the poor. Then come follow me. See, what did he show that man?
The Scripture says that he walked away dejected. He was broken
in his countenance. He was solemn in his thoughts.
He was labored over the reality that he did not love the Lord
at all. He did not love God, he loved himself. He did not
love the prestige of the glory of God that stood before him
in this man named Jesus. He did not love the glory of
God. He loved himself in his own established hierarchy of
governing. He was the ruler. He was rich
and he was young. And there was no way in the measuring
of this picture of all that he was and had accomplished and
had obtained in comparison to this man standing before him
who was homeless and dirty. Without being born
of the Spirit, this man could see nothing. So the use of the
law and evangelism points to the sinfulness of man, but without
the gospel of grace, God will not regenerate. He will not bring
to life anyone just because they know they're a sinner. Unless we teach them that Christ,
who had no sin, became sin, that we might be the righteousness
of God. That Christ's work on the cross is sufficient and the
only way to stand right before the Lord. That there is no other
place under heaven in the cosmos by which someone can stand righteous
except through the finished work of Jesus. That Jesus Christ is
our ticket to God, is our train to eternal life, is a river of
living water, is the bread through which we live, etc., etc., etc. So the law is good. And the law
shows us our sin and that it is sinful beyond measure and
we are grateful for it. We know then that our worship
is deeper the more we see the picture of how horrid our sin
is. The latter part of Paul's ministry,
he goes to call himself the chief of sinners. Now of course, that's
somewhat hyperbolic. Was He the chief of all the sinners
of the world? I don't know. But in His own
eyes, He was. No born-again believer has ever
stood at the precipice of their prayers and said, Oh God, I am
so good. Look at how my life has turned
out. Look at my obedience. Thank you, God, that you have
worked in me, that I'm no longer an alcoholic, that I'm no longer
this, that I'm no longer that. Yes, we can be thankful that
God has delivered us from some of these vices, but none of us
have ever prayed in that way. If Jesus were to walk into our
presence, we'd not stand and brush ourselves off and say,
Oh, wow, He's going to see who I am now. What is it that the
Scripture tells us about those who came in the presence of their
King who were born of God? Do not look upon me, for I am
a sinner. I am not worthy to stand in your
presence, God. And they fall to their face. Moses fell down before the presence
of God through the burning of a bush, for where he walked was
holy. A regenerate man never measures
up in his own mind, so that his resolve, his trust, his faith,
which was given to him by God the Father through the Spirit,
is always in Christ. Always in the righteousness of
our Lord, who is our only hope for being satisfactory to our
Father who is in heaven. By Christ we live. O Father, how glorious and good
this is, Lord, that we are able to praise You because of what You've done for
us. We don't worship out of precepts and types and shadows, Lord.
We worship face to face through Christ our Lord, in whom we see the fullness of
Your glory. And from Your Word, You reveal His face perfectly. Your law manifests Your righteousness,
but God, oh, how much more glorious is the manifestation of Your
righteousness through Jesus Christ, who You put forward to satisfy
Your wrath against us. Let us worship. Let us be thankful. Let us understand the law as
it was intended to be understood. For we are spiritual in our minds
because You have granted us repentance and understanding. Though we
await the day when our whole self is made anew, until that
day help us to hold fast to Christ. In His name we pray. Thank you
for listening. We hope that this message has
encouraged you in the faith. Subscribe to these messages and
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